Teacher Man
Frank McCourt
Scribner, 2005
Reviewed by W.D. Blackmon
Department Head, English
** Note: Frank McCourt will be visiting the Missouri State University campus from November 5 through November 7 and will speak to various audiences (including our faculty and students, high school students, and community education and business leaders). Alert your students, other faculty on campus, and your friends and family about this visit. Detailed schedules of the visit can be found at coal.missouristate.edu.
Teacher Man is the third memoir by Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Frank McCourt. His first memoir, Angela’s Ashes, is still his most famous work, and ‘Tis is his second book. Teacher Man is the most inspiring book I’ve read about teaching. It’s also incredibly funny throughout, although it never reaches the gymnastic levels of despair found in Angela’s Ashes (and it doesn’t need to–teaching high school English for over thirty years in New York City is certainly a difficult-enough life).
If there is to be a fourth memoir by McCourt, I assume it will be something along the line of Rich, Famous Writer Man. I would be eager to read this book, as well; in fact, one of the funniest motifs in Teacher Man details McCourt’s fantasies, as a poor, overworked high school teacher, of the high life he will lead as a rich and famous writer (these fantasies are all the funnier because he doesn’t really begin his writing career until he retires from teaching). These fantasies are also funny because of the horrendous weekly cart load of homework McCourt must deal with (successful creative writing in the face of this workload is absurd). Near the end of his memoir he details the workload he faces at home after teaching five classes every day. He has 175 students, and the weekly essay assignments he makes are 350 words each (assuming he makes only one writing assignment that week). He struggles valiantly to critique, in detailed and meaningful ways, the 43,750 words he had to “read, correct, evaluate and grade on evenings and weekends” every week. Despite his vigilance, though, he often finds himself nodding off, dreaming about the voluptuous starlets he would associate with on a daily basis as a rich and famous writer.
McCourt’s style is to immerse the reader in the immediacy of each ongoing scene, so much so that much of the book is written in present tense (the same approach he used in Angela’s Ashes). Much of the humor (drama and pathos) of the book comes from the monstrous difficulty of teaching high school English students in New York City beginning in 1958 at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island. Teachers reading the book will recognize the universality of the challenge he faces in the classroom. Before you can hope to teach students anything, you have to get their attention and “win them over.” McCourt’s initial attempts in this area nearly got him fired his first two days of teaching. The first day he picked up and ate in front of the class (to the class’s delight) a thrown bologna sandwich he intercepted; the second day he answered a student’s question, “So, mister, did you go out with girls in Ireland?” with “No, dammit. Sheep. We went out with sheep.” His later attempts getting students excited about reading, writing, and learning were much more sophisticated and successful. He knew his students’ best writing in his early years consisted exclusively of the forged excuse notes they wrote to him, notes supposedly written by their parents. He had one of his classes totally engaged in the writing process by giving the assignment to write excuse notes from “history” (from Adam or Eve to God, for example). At New York’s most prestigious public high school, Stuyvesant High School, he had his academic all-star creative writing students ecstatically reading dramatically from cookbooks to various colorful forms of musical accompaniment (teaching them vocabulary, history, sheer delight).
Obviously, I could go on and on about this book. It’s a great book (especially for teachers), and, as my seven-year old son would say, “There’s no boring part to it.”